Obamacare

Obama Thinks Obamacare Will Survive the Trump Administration

After six years of futile attempts to destroy the Affordable Care Act, Donald Trump’s unexpected victory over Hillary Clinton changed the calculus for the Republican Party. Now, with near-complete control over the United States government, the G.O.P. finally has the opportunity to gut Obamacare. But for his part, President Barack Obama thinks his signature healthcare legislation will survive the next four years—it just might have a different name.

When asked by George Stephanopoulos during an interview with ABC’s This Week if Obamacare will endure the next four years, the president responded, “I think it will,” but conceded that it may be called something else. “If in fact the Republicans make some modifications, some of which I may have been seeking previously, but they wouldn’t cooperate because they didn’t want to make the system work, and re-label it as Trumpcare—I’m fine with that,” the president added.

Less than 24 hours after Trump won the White House, Republican leaders made it known that repealing Obamacare was a top priority of the new administration—a promise the real estate developer and the G.O.P. alike rode to the presidency and majorities in both houses of Congress. But in the months since the election, divides in Republican ranks have emerged over how the party should dismantle the law. Since the Affordable Care Act was signed into law in 2010, Republicans reached a consensus that the legislation was a disaster, but never managed to rally around a replacement. And now, a debate is brewing in the G.O.P. as to whether the party should wait to repeal the law until after a new healthcare system is agreed upon rather than repealing the law without a substitute.

It is this fact that Obama says makes him “skeptical” that Republicans in Congress can agree upon an alternative to Obamacare that doesn’t leave millions the of Americans currently covered under the law without health insurance. Or as Obama warned days after the election, “Now comes the hard part. Now is governance.”

The high political cost of potentially upending the $3 trillion U.S. healthcare system has not gone unacknowledged by the G.O.P. Last week, Vice President-elect Mike Pencejoyfully informed reporters on Capitol Hill that plans to dismantle the Affordable Care Act were underway, but also laid the groundwork for blaming Democrats for any fallout, stressing the importance of reminding American voters of “what they already know about Obamacare—that the promises that were made were all broken.” And Trump echoed the sentiment on Twitter, stressing that the Democrats need to “own the failed Obamacare disaster.”

But Chuck Schumer has a different plan. “They want to repeal it and then try to hang it on us. Not going to happen. It's their responsibility, plain and simple,” the Senate minority leader asserted.